The National Congress Buildings in Brasília. James Harrison / Shutterstock.com

Later this afternoon, Mayor Vince Gray will be joined by Agnelo Queiroz, the governor of the Federal District of Brazil—i.e., the mayor of Brasília—to sign a Sister City Agreement with the Brazilian capital city.

Currently D.C. has 12 Sister City Agreements with cities across the world: Bangkok; Dakar, Senegal; Beijing; Brussels; Pretoria, South Africa; Paris; Athens, Greece; Seoul, South Korea; Accra, Ghana; Sunderland, United Kingdom; Rome; and Ankara, Turkey. All but Sunderland are capital cities—that one’s George Washington’s ancestral home.

Brasília has some interesting parallels to D.C. First off, neither city really existed before the federal government decided to put a capital city there; D.C. in the late 1700s, Brazil in the 1950s. We had Pierre L’Enfant design D.C., they had Oscar Niemeyer. And then there’s this:

Until the 1980s, the mayor of Brasília was appointed by the Federal Government, and the laws of Brasília were issued by the Federal Senate. After the Constitution of 1998, Brasília gained the right to elect its Governor, and a District Assembly was elected to exercise the Legislative Power.

Voting rights for Brasília! Direito de voto para Brasília!